Ninety percent of the existing building stock in Europe was built before 1990. These buildings are in urgent need for a significant improvement of energy-efficiency through renovation. State-of-the-art renovation solutions are available, but costly and lengthy renovation processes and incomprehensible technical complexities hinder the achievement of a wide impact at a European scale. This paper...

The European climate strategy has encouraged the usage of the External Thermal Insulation Composite System (ETICS) to increase the energy efficiency of external building envelopes. This externally and relatively easily applicable façade solution must meet various technical requirements. This paper develops a technical severity evaluation model of on-site construction activities of ETICS to prio...

Exchange processes of surface and groundwater are important for the management of water quantity and quality as well as for the ecological functioning. In contrast to most numerical simulations using coupled models to investigate these processes, we present a novel integral formulation for the sediment-water-interface. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model OpenFOAM was used to solve an e...

Increasing interest is nowadays being paid to improving the thermal insulation of buildings in order to save energy and reduce ecological problems. Foamed concrete has unique characteristics and considerable potential as a promising material in construction applications. It is produced with a wide range of dry densities, between 600 and 1600 kg/m3. However, at a low density below 500 kg/m3, it ...

Lakes are known to be strongly affected by climate change as a result of their sensitivity to atmospheric forcing. The combined response of urban lakes to climatic changes and to urbanization of the catchment may be further altered by water quality management measures. We studied Lake Tegel in Berlin, Germany as a representative urban lake profoundly influenced by intense water management measu...

The increased number of energy efficiency requirements of the European Union has increased the renovation rate of apartment buildings. The external thermal insulation composite system (ETICS) is often used to upgrade the façade. However, the construction process shortcomings very often cause defects shortly after completion. This paper develops a technical–economic relevance assessment model of...

Foamed concrete contains numerous pores inside the material, and these pores are a significant factor determining the material characteristics. In particular, the pore distribution characteristics of foamed concrete significantly affect its thermal and mechanical properties. Therefore, an appropriate investigation is necessary for a more detailed understanding of foamed concrete. Here, a set of...

The treatment of diverse uncertainties is an important challenge in structural engineering problems, especially from the viewpoint of realistic analysis. Inaccuracy and variability are always present and have to be quantified by either probabilistic, possibilistic, polymorphic or other uncertainty approaches. Regardless to the applied uncertainty quantification method, the numerical predictions...

Urban lakes are aquatic ecosystems that are influenced by a water management system and by a possibly strongly sealed urban catchment. The water management aims to fulfill multiple objectives: providing drinking water, sanitation and recreation for the people as well as keeping the ecosystem in a sustainable and resilient state. Urban lakes are facing several stressors. For instance, climate ch...

The impacts of climate change can become a trigger for critical changes in the spatial and temporal distribution of water resources in many regions in Europe. This will lead from obviously negative effects in some regions to creation of opportunities in others. In the face of future changes: economic, social and environmental, both natural and triggered by anthropogenic activities, the effectiv...

Complex transport mechanism and interaction between fluid and sediment make the mathematical and numerical modeling of sediment transport very challenging. Different types of models can lead to different results. This paper investigates a non-equilibrium sediment transport model based on the total load. In this type of model, it is assumed that a bed slide will occur if the bed slope reaches a ...

This paper presents novel flux and source term treatments within a Godunov-type finite volume framework for predicting the depth-averaged shallow water flow and sediment transport with enhanced the accuracy and stability. The suspended load ratio is introduced to differentiate between the advection of the suspended load and the advection of water. A modified Harten, Lax and van Leer Riemann sol...

This paper presents numerical simulations of dam-break flow over a movable bed. Two different mathematical models were compared: a fully coupled formulation of shallow water equations with erosion and deposition terms (a depth-averaged concentration flux model), and shallow water equations with a fully coupled Exner equation (a bed load flux model). Both models were discretized using the cell-c...

This paper describes an improved vector manipulation multislope monotone upstream-centred scheme for conservation laws (MUSCL) reconstruction for solving the shallow water equations on unstructured grids. This improved MUSCL reconstruction method includes a bigger stencil for the interpolation and saves time for determining the geometric relations compared to the original vector manipulation me...

In shallow water flow and transport modeling, the monotonic upstream‐centered scheme for conservation laws (MUSCL) is widely used to extend the original Godunov scheme to second‐order accuracy. The most important step in MUSCL‐type schemes is MUSCL reconstruction, which calculate‐extrapolates the values of independent variables from the cell center to the edge. The monotonicity of the scheme is...

This Ph.D. thesis advances the fully coupling of robust shallow water flow and sediment transport modeling.
The first part mainly focuses on the multislope MUSCL reconstruction for shallow water flow on unstructured grids. A limitation method for reconstruction of velocities avoids extremely high values for wet/dry fronts. The reconstruction methods are tested via analytical benchmarks and lab...

The hydropower production, water supply and aquaculture services of the Itaparica Reservoir are of immense importance for the Brazilian Northeast. Uncontrolled water resources consumption (e.g. irrigation, water supply), climate and land use change effects deteriorated the water quantity and quality in the reservoir, leading to socio-economic and environmental problems. In this work, a depth-av...

The treatment of diverse uncertainties is an important challenge in structural engineering problems, especially from the viewpoint of realistic analysis. Inaccuracy and variability are always present and have to be quantified by either probabilistic, possibilistic, polymorphic or other uncertainty approaches. Regardless to the applied uncertainty quantification method, the numerical predictions...